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A Park, an Oyster Farm and Science, Part 2

Heidi Schumann for The New York TimesOystermen docking their boat in Drakes Estero, within California’s Point Reyes National Seashore.

For two years, all sides in the debate over the continued operation of a Northern California oyster farm have been hoping for vindication from the federal Marine Mammal Commission.

The five-year fight at Point Reyes National Seashore, which I wrote about last March and my colleague Leslie Kaufman wrote about earlier, originally revolved around the perceived need to extend wilderness areas and eliminate the oyster beds.

But it has another dimension: a fierce argument over whether federal science was torqued to paint the oyster farm as a bad ecological actor. The hope was that the Marine Mammal Commission would resolve that argument.

The commission’s report, released Tuesday, vindicated no one. Instead, it came to a resoundingly inconclusive conclusion.

The background: An oyster farm has been operating for more than 70 years in an estuary called Drakes Estero, which is now within the national seashore; its operations span two owners. Its oyster beds are located in a quiet inlet on the ocean side of the Point Reyes peninsula where a large colony of seals uses the sandbars to raise pups. The area was declared “potential wilderness” in two 1976 laws.
The scientific question is whether the activities of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company harm the seals, as an earlier park superintendent claimed. The report’s conclusion: maybe they do, and maybe they don’t. Much scientific work remains undone, the report said.

The commission’s report comes less than a year left before the National Park Service has to decide if the oyster operation must close. A draft environmental impact statement released earlier this year favored closure of the oyster farm.

The oyster operation has some conspicuous support on Capitol Hill. A 2009 measure introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, a Democrat and an oyster farm backer, would allow the park service to grant the oyster company a special-use permit to operate for 10 more years.

A House subcommittee is also planning a hearing on the oyster farm — characterized as a “small business” and a “job creator” — and on the accumulated studies and reviews of the park service’s work.

Locally, the questions about the oyster operation and the quality of park science have become fiercely personal, ending old friendships in environmentally-conscious Marin County.

The authors of the Marine Mammal Commission study summarized their dilemma about assessing any findings in the existing science and scientific critiques by saying, “The data supporting the above analyses are scant and have been stretched to their limit.”

At best, the report said, the scanty data in the park scientists’ analyses, published in a peer-reviewed journal, show a correlation between oyster-farming activity and seal discomfort, but did not directly link the two. At worst, the hypothesis driving the analyses was “irresponsible,” a scientific adviser to the commission wrote.

Earlier this fall, the National Park Service published a draft environmental impact statement suggesting that the best course, environmentally, is to evict the oyster farm when its lease is up at the end of next year.

Those arguing for eviction say that the oyster beds are in an area designated as “potential wilderness” by Congress. Uses that don’t conform to the definition of wilderness — “untrammeled by man” — should be discontinued when the opportunity arises. A 2004 report from the Interior Department solicitor’s office supports this view.

The oyster farm’s opponents get support for their view in a House committee report on the legislation Congress passed in 1976, which created wilderness and “potential wilderness” with the national seashore. They refer to the House report language frequently.

They do not mention the report from the Senate side on a companion bill, which said, in essence: We don’t necessarily buy into this whole “potential wilderness” idea. That second law has no provision that the non-wilderness uses should be rapidly phased out.

That law is not cited by oyster farm opponents. Their historical arguments were more directly undercut this summer when two former congressmen who worked on the wilderness bill declared that they had always intended to keep historic activities like oyster farming and ranching operating at Point Reyes.

On a scientific basis, there should be no problem with doing so, wrote several of the commission’s expert advisers. “I don’t think the mariculture operation is incompatible with an objective of having a healthy population of harbor seals in Drakes Estero,” wrote Peter Boveng of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

His colleague Sean Hayes suggested that removing the oysters, which filter the estero’s water, could lead to a harmful accumulation of seal feces. “Attention needs to be placed on whether current mariculture is providing an ecosystem service to the Drakes Estero ecosystem today,” he wrote.

The main report, however,was framed around the accusations of bad science. It dealt with those in detail in more than 40 pages, paying scant attention to panel members’ recommendations for future cooperation between the commercial farm and the park. Such “adaptive management,” the main report concluded, would “not be a simple, trivial matter.”

Why? Everyone’s efforts to determine what affects seal behavior “would have to be based on getting at the truth, rather than having those with conflicting viewpoints seeking simply to win the debate.”

Not a simple matter at all.

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